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For all the people of God, this is the touchstone, to know if what we believe is with Him, or with something else, if we are walking with Him, or with something else, if the one who speaks is speaking for Him, or for something else.
Love cannot be counterfeit for any duration, but always shows itself to be genuine or not. It does not speak with hate or anger or fear, but with a fullness of existence that can only be approximated by that which is opposed to His existence.
When you are doubt, look for the love, and if it is not there, if it is hardness disguised as 'love,' then you know what it is.
Love is not easy, and is not a natural state, seeming weak and despicable to the fallen, but rather is a conscious disposition of the mind and the heart. It is a habit of acting and looking at things, that becomes easier and more comfortable as we carry that yoke on the weaker nature of our emotions, which over time becomes light, and a light.
This is how the people of God may judge themselves and their own actions along the way. If there is no love evident in the words and the heart, then the speaker and their words are not of God, but of something else.
God is the essence of existence, which is love.
"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the fullness comes, the partial will come to an end.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly,[b] but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."
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